Epilogue
On May 15th, 2011, I posted a link on my Facebook wall to a video I’d made detailing the pattern of dishonesty on the part of the administration at Seattle’s Bush School. Although the school had long prided itself on being proactive with regard to identifying and eradicating “White Privilege”, the truth was that the choices and actions of the administration, as detailed in the video, provided a more clear-cut illustration of how “White Privilege” works today, and how institutionalized racism survives here in the “Post-Racial” America.
The story was immediately picked up by local media. During that following week, if you picked up a newspaper or watched the local news broadcasts, you would hear about it.
Having the story move beyond the Bush campus was something that I had worked for more than a year to try to avoid. While my wife, kids, and I were all members of the Bush School community, we worked hard to try to get the school to acknowledge and address the corruption and dishonesty of the school’s administration. The issue was raised with the school’s Head, followed by the Board of Directors and the faculty. At each stage, the school’s response made clear that they were intent on sweeping the issue under the carpet instead of doing the necessary work of insuring that the administration would not find itself in a similar situation again.
I, too, was tempted to wash my hands of the issue. However, I heard from middle-aged Bush School alumni and also from former faculty members how disgusted they had been and continued to be with the “sleazy behavior” of the administrators. The consensus among those with whom I spoke was that if the school refused to address a problem this large on its own, then perhaps the local press would be better able to do so.
I didn’t run with the story to any media outlet, but I did know that as soon as the truth was told the media would quickly run with it.
When the story hit the press, the reaction of the school community was extreme and deplorable.
Students and parents at the school sought out a website that would let them post anonymously about the issue. These folks would identify themselves as parents or students at the school, but because of the nature of what they wrote they, understandably, refused to use their name.
What they took to the net to write were lies.
They tried to dismiss the facts of the video by writing lies about the central example I’d presented; these statements were contradicted by the school itself.
Others, unable to find a single untruth in the video, would just dismiss the whole thing as “Bullshit”, and then go on to try to build a lie explaining why I would have made such a story up.
The main narrative was that I had been a horrible teacher, whose habit of physically harming students, along with other equally scandalous behavior, made it so that the school had sought to terminate my employment for years.
These stories were ridiculous and were spun by people with a mob mentality that told them that if enough of them threw their feces at a wall, that perhaps some of it would stick. Many of the lies suggested that those who were fabricating the stories had never worked for a living and consequently didn’t understand that there’s a paper record detailing the truth of a person’s employment after years of working at a place.
The detailed record of my exit interview and the huge personnel file [which the school first resisted providing me with a complete copy of, until my lawyers were brought in] both had no mention of any of the imagined offenses dreamt up by the mob. Additionally, the letter from the administration pleading with me to change my mind about not returning for a 5th year leaves no doubt about either whether or why I chose to leave my position at the school.
During that time, I stayed above the fray, and let the Bush School’s community comments (that the media was labeling as “insanity” from “anonymous rage monkeys”) go unanswered.
But recently, it’s come to my attention that those who have tried to follow the story online, after the fact, find themselves unclear about the “end” of the story.
And so, I’m writing now to give the story its epilogue.
I’ll try to make it brief.
It is not my wish to paint the whole Bush community as “bad”, “dishonest”, “corrupt” or “racist”. It is a community of individuals and there were a wide variety of reactions to my disclosure.
I think the best way to see both the best and the worst of how the school community reacted is to look at the reactions of 4 of the different people working at Bush in the wake of the video being released:
At the heart of this whole story is Frank Magusin. Frank’s title is “Head of School”, but new faculty members at the school are informed that “Head Fundraiser” would be a more descriptive title. Those who’ve argued that the real nature of the corruption at the Bush School is structural, point out that it could only be expected that a school’s main fundraiser will try to find ways to do what he can to keep the million-dollar donors happy with the school. The trouble arises when the school’s head fundraiser is allowed full veto-power over the unanimous wisdom of the school’s true educators. There wasn’t a single teacher at the school who believed that the school should reverse course on its promise to hold “Wallace”[1] accountable for the actions he made with his Nigga letter. (And there still isn’t. Indeed, after the story broke in the Seattle media, there was infighting among the faculty over who worked the hardest to get the Administration to not choose money over truth). There also wasn’t a teacher at the school who didn’t understand that this decision was Frank’s alone, and it was a decision he could not defend without telling lies. The very day this horrendous decision was announced there was intense anger with Magusin from all corners of the faculty. “Fuck Frank” was how that anger was expressed in one of the emails I received about the issue just hours after faculty was sat down to be told ‘How it was going to be.’ Behind closed doors, we heard about all of the wealth and the power/influence Wallace’s father had. The administrators argued that we just walk away from the situation, telling us about how much change Wallace’s father could bring about with a single phone call. But beyond this closed-door meeting, the administration proffered up a different story. “I have no idea who was behind that letter,” Frank would state repeatedly. This was the account Frank gave to students, faculty, parents, and even his own Board. Ultimately, my decision to go to the larger community with the story only came after a board member told me when the Board had let it be known that they were very upset about the handling of the situation, Frank had continued to let them believe that the reason why no one had been disciplined around the issue of the letter was that there simply wasn’t anyone to discipline; that the school had no idea who might answer for the circulation of the letter. This continued to be the understanding of members of the Board into the following school year, after Wallace was long gone.
In fact, Frank Magusin clung to his “Didn’t Know/Didn’t Discipline” story for more than a year after the letter was written and passed around on campus.
Although there were attempts made by the faculty and the parent community to get Frank to acknowledge that this cover of his was a lie, he stood by it from January of 2010 until May of 2011. What was made clear in those 16 months, is that there was simply no one WITHIN the Bush school community that would get Frank to state plainly that he did, in fact, know who had written the letter. In May 2011, the only force that could have exposed Frank’s story as a lie decided to take action. When the outside press began asking questions, Frank promptly switched from one lie to another. “Didn’t Know/Didn’t Discipline” changed to “Did Know/Did Discipline,” which made it clear that neither story was more than half true, and demonstrated that Frank Magusin would say absolutely anything if he believed it might make the story go away.
The brand new, “Did Know/Did Discipline” story was sent out to all parents in the community in a letter signed by Frank and the President of the Bush School Board, John Holt. Days later, when questioned by local CBS reporter, Debra Horne, Frank would repeat the story. His hope seemed to be that this new lie would be most effective in persuading the media to not run their stories. It didn’t work.
Worse than that, it meant that those who had worked to be obedient subordinates to Frank, and stand by his “Didn’t Know/Didn’t Discipline” story felt burned. The change of heart made by both Jack McHenry and Eddie Moore (see below) can be traced to this dramatic 180 taken by Frank. The anonymous members of the Bush Smear Campaign Squad were also left dumbfounded. For the 6 days between when the story broke, and when Frank reversed his cover story in his CBS interview, many members of the anonymous Bush School Smear Squad had worked to help Spread Frank’s first “Didn’t Know/Didn’t Discipline” lie. Only the day before, a Bush student who identified themselves as a “relative of one of these alleged RRBC members” had published online this first lie of Frank’s, exactly as Frank had been presenting it. But the following day, after this change of course, Frank’s defenders didn’t know how to best ‘minion’ for the man. (A few weeks later, at the 2011 graduation, one could find new graduates defending Frank saying “Truman’s story is all bull, the school didn’t discipline anyone because they didn’t know who to discipline” and other students who said “Truman’s story is all bull, the school didknow who to discipline, and so of course they did.”
There was one man who had no confusion about how he would chose to deal with Frank’s new lie. Shortly after the controversy around the nigger letter first began in early 2010, the school lost not just me, but also the school’s Director of Admissions (who had been an early and vocal advocate for having the school increase its own awareness about the RRBC and their actions), the Upper School’s Front Desk worker (one of the school’s few African-American employees), and the President of the School’s Board. While Frank was dealing with a Board that was asking questions of him that he was choosing to answer with lies, the school had to choose a new Board President. Frank Magusin let it be known that he had a clear favorite for the job. Frank was in a bad mess, and he needed just the right tool to get him out of it. He found what he was looking for in the form of John Holt, who in 2010 became the school’s new President of the Board.
John made it clear from the beginning of his term that he wanted to hear as little as possible about the nigga letter issue. His lack of curiosity regarding the issue was rather striking for someone whose job was to oversee the actions of the Head of School. When Frank Magusin and those around him were in a panic about how to “contain” the spreading story of the school’s corruption, John agreed to sign his name to a letter concocted by Magusin. This letter was the big “roll out” of the new lie from Frank, the public release of the “Did Know/Did Discipline” story meant to replace the worn out “Didn’t Know/Didn’t Discipline” one.
They say a dog is man’s best friend, but Frank surely had no better best friend on May 18th than John Holt, who would sign off on the statement that the Board had done a “thorough” investigation into the whole situation.
The letter seemed to be designed for people who were not paying any attention to the story, and who hungered for instruction to continue to not pay attention. Anyone with any awareness of the story before receiving the letter could only scratch their head and laugh at its contents. The night the letter went out my wife and I received calls from people who were still at the school who had determined that the only choice was to leave Bush now that it was this clear that the school was intent on not uprooting the rot that had taken hold of the school. One set of parents who called couldn’t stop laughing at the absurdity of the letter. “Thorough investigation”?? What sense could be made of John Holt’s claim when the people serving on the board that he was “leading” were stating that they’d been fed only the first lie even late into the 2010-2011 school year? Holt’s thorough review of the school’s actions seems to have not included speaking to:
-The faculty member to whom “Wallace” confessed multiple times about having written the letter, or -the full class of students who had watched “Wallace” confess to faculty about writing the letter, or -any of the students or faculty or parents who had expressed anger, at times directly to the Board about the fact that no one had been disciplined for this racially hostile joke.
It’s hard to find anyone who was contacted as a part of this alleged thorough investigation other than Frank Magusin. No one else, not anyone else from the Board or from the school’s administration, would add their name to Frank and John’s at the bottom of this cover-up letter. Not that the two didn’t try to find someone to stick to this story with them. There was an intention to have Jack McHenry sign off on this letter as well, but he would not do that. Not only that, but he has made clear that he wouldn’t ever sign his name to a statement claiming that the Nigga Letter issue at Bush was handled honestly and appropriately. While Jack had stood in support of Frank’s tale for more than a year, the whiplash he felt when Frank reversed his story caused Jack to have a change of heart on the issue. Frank’s 180 on what the story was behind the Nigga Letter inspired about a very different 180 from Jack. Until just shortly before, when the school was still sticking with its “Didn’t Know/Didn’t Discipline” story, Frank would come up to the Wissner building, on the upper school campus, to meet with the full upper school faculty and tell them that he was on their side - that he too didn’t think it was okay for Wallace to never have had to account or be held accountable for his actions. Frank, in detail, talked of how he walked up to Wallace on Wallace’s 2010 Graduation day, and told him that he was “very disappointed” that Wallace never chose to address (at the very least) the full senior class on the topic of his misconduct. (No one knows whether this exchange actually took place or whether it’s another piece of Frank’s fiction. Regardless, it’s the tale of an administrator who believes he gets to have things both ways, all the time). In those same meetings, Frank would loom over Jack McHenry, the Head of the Upper School, as Jack read out, word-for-word, a prepared, written statement that stuck with the story that the Letter issue had been handled in a honest and responsible manner. Though faculty got to hear this statement once, they were not allowed to take a second look at the statement, and faculty who jotted notes as Jack spoke were ordered to shred them immediately. (All of this happened long before any video had hit the web, or had even been filmed.) After Frank’s reversal, Jack would never again talk the same way about the school’s handling of the letter or the boy to whom the letter belonged. Jack made no secret of his turn-around. He would tell students and faculty about his change of heart, saying that while he’d said one thing about his reaction to the video prior to the drafting of Magusin and Holt’s cover-up letter he didn’t sign, he now wanted the community to know that what was in the video was indeed the truth. He said he was thankful that I’d done the courageous work of getting the truth out there and that he considered me to be a guardian angel of the school for having forced the school to deal with the truth of the administration's mishandling of the issue, a truth that it very much did not want to confront. By virtue of my efforts and the light they shed on this issue, Jack finally heard directly from specific African-American students about how hurt they’d been by the letter, and how they had to go, on their own, to Wallace to try to get an apology from Wallace. (Not surprisingly, having been given the signal by the Administration that he didn’t need to apologize for his actions, Wallace simply shrugged off the request coming from a hurt classmate: “I thought it was funny” he would reply). In a meeting of students and faculty who had attended the previous White Privilege Conference, Jack McHenry explained that “WE had been lied to by Frank” (emphasis mine). Subsequently, and this for me is huge, Jack offered a personal apology to the student who had tried, unsuccessfully, to get her own apology from Wallace while Frank attempted to cover up the entire ordeal. I don’t think the significance of this apology cannot be overstated. Frank had made it known via his actions that some members of the community were more deserving of dignity than others. Frank had made it very clear that between a nigger in the right, and a donor in the wrong, whom he would stand with. In the WPC meeting, Jack McHenry did all he could to try to right Frank’s wrong. And for that, I salute him. Jack wasn’t the only one to speak candidly in that meeting. The founder of the WPC, Dr. Eddie Moore Jr., had been lured to work at the Bush School by Frank Magusin, who had promissed Dr. Moore that issues of equality, diversity and white privilege needed to be, and would be examined openly at the school if he’d come to work there. In the meeting wherein Jack apologized for Frank’s behavior, Eddie used his own verb to talk of Frank’s actions. “We were played by Frank,” Eddie told the students present at the meeting. This meeting was also attended by both teaching and non-teaching staff, a number of whom reached out to me after the meeting took place. Eddie had seen his own misgivings about Frank Magusin grow in the previous months. In the Fall of 2010, there had been a brief, all-campus discussion about the nigga-letter issue after I had e-mailed to faculty a written version of the story (that would later be told in video form). Just afterwards, in early winter, Eddie, seeing the writing on the wall, began to send out job applications to other schools. Eddie and his wife, who had just had a baby, had planned to stay in Seattle and have Eddie stay at Bush for many years to come. Those plans went through an abrupt change. At the time of the meeting, it was clear that Eddie was thinking about the issue of the nigga letter frequently. Eddie talked of how angry it had made him to see Wallace -- this student who had had both his formal record and his informal reputation within the community white-washed by Frank’s lies -- return to campus midway through his first year of college, “and be treated like a celebrity”. He also spoke of how on the previous Sunday, so many of the fellow parishioners at his church had had asked him, “How could you work at such a place?” It turned out to be a question that Eddie could not answer. A few days later, in the heat of the controversy, Eddie announced that he would be leaving Bush in just a few weeks and moving his family to New York City. I heard from parents that Frank was at first desperate to talk Eddie into staying and then was desperate to try to “prove” that Eddie’s departure had “nothing at all” to deal with the nigga letter controversy. “Eddie had applied months before the video was released! It was back in the winter!” Frank would blurt to anyone who might mark him. “And how does he address the fact that Eddie’s winter applications came on the heels of the nigga letter becoming a faculty-staff wide controversy that had Frank scrambling in the fall?” “Uh…..Frank isn’t really making an effort to make his lies believable any more. He’s just kind of going through the motions of saying them,” a dad who was on his way out of the Bush school parent community in May of 2011 told me.
If there was any confusion about Eddie’s take on the school on his way out, it disappeared when Eddie sat down with local journalist and friend before leaving town. Eddie was upset with how little power he had to do anything, but also went on to say that he was disappointed in the school and in the fact that he hadn’t had much power there; he said that the whole system at the school was broken and that bringing in someone, anyone, to serve as diversity director wasn’t going to fix it.
Eddie wasn’t the only one who wanted nothing more to do with the school after their actions had been laid bare. Numerous African-American students from different grade levels and backgrounds withdrew from the school in the wake of the controversy. It was hard for me to watch as those who, like myself, had a genuine interest in doing the difficult work around issues of diversity and privilege left the school knowing that the very rich and very white families who saw nothing wrong with the way Frank had played the community were happy to stay. It wasn’t that anyone was confused about whether Frank had lied, it’s that he was THEIR liar. He had lied TO, and lied FOR, just the right people. Was there any good that came out of my actions if the bulk of the community squandered their opportunity to bring about meaningful change to the school? Yes. I’d always known that there was a risk that the school community as a whole would take the low road in response to this truth coming out. Regardless, I decided that if the ONLY good that came out of the disclosure was that the larger community would have the opportunity to know the truth about Magusin, John Holt, and the lengths those two were willing to go to keep the school’s wealthiest donors happy, then it would be worth doing. If the only student who received an apology from Jack and received the message that Wallace’s family’s donations should not be allowed to excuse his behavior was the student who received Jack’s apology in that WPC meeting, then yes, it was well worth it.
Truman Buffett
1. “Wallace” was a pseudonym I employed in the video in an effort to underscore that it is not the act of the boy that is the main issue for people to focus on, but rather, the actions the school took (and didn’t take) in response to his actions. In all school discussions about what the proper consequences should be for writing the letter, the child’s actual first and last names were, of course, used.[it's worth adding here that before this piece was posted here -- before today -- EVERYTHING WRITTEN ABOVE HAS ALREADY BEEN GIVEN TO EVERYONE NAMED in the piece. They've been asked to provide feedback on anything in the piece that they believe to false or inaccurate, they've also been asked for their comments or responses to the piece. The moment I hear from them, I will make it clear either in the body of this piece, or in the comments below. If you are reading THIS SENTENCE it means I have yet to hear of anything that anyone named in the piece disputes].
The story was immediately picked up by local media. During that following week, if you picked up a newspaper or watched the local news broadcasts, you would hear about it.
Having the story move beyond the Bush campus was something that I had worked for more than a year to try to avoid. While my wife, kids, and I were all members of the Bush School community, we worked hard to try to get the school to acknowledge and address the corruption and dishonesty of the school’s administration. The issue was raised with the school’s Head, followed by the Board of Directors and the faculty. At each stage, the school’s response made clear that they were intent on sweeping the issue under the carpet instead of doing the necessary work of insuring that the administration would not find itself in a similar situation again.
I, too, was tempted to wash my hands of the issue. However, I heard from middle-aged Bush School alumni and also from former faculty members how disgusted they had been and continued to be with the “sleazy behavior” of the administrators. The consensus among those with whom I spoke was that if the school refused to address a problem this large on its own, then perhaps the local press would be better able to do so.
I didn’t run with the story to any media outlet, but I did know that as soon as the truth was told the media would quickly run with it.
When the story hit the press, the reaction of the school community was extreme and deplorable.
Students and parents at the school sought out a website that would let them post anonymously about the issue. These folks would identify themselves as parents or students at the school, but because of the nature of what they wrote they, understandably, refused to use their name.
What they took to the net to write were lies.
They tried to dismiss the facts of the video by writing lies about the central example I’d presented; these statements were contradicted by the school itself.
Others, unable to find a single untruth in the video, would just dismiss the whole thing as “Bullshit”, and then go on to try to build a lie explaining why I would have made such a story up.
The main narrative was that I had been a horrible teacher, whose habit of physically harming students, along with other equally scandalous behavior, made it so that the school had sought to terminate my employment for years.
These stories were ridiculous and were spun by people with a mob mentality that told them that if enough of them threw their feces at a wall, that perhaps some of it would stick. Many of the lies suggested that those who were fabricating the stories had never worked for a living and consequently didn’t understand that there’s a paper record detailing the truth of a person’s employment after years of working at a place.
The detailed record of my exit interview and the huge personnel file [which the school first resisted providing me with a complete copy of, until my lawyers were brought in] both had no mention of any of the imagined offenses dreamt up by the mob. Additionally, the letter from the administration pleading with me to change my mind about not returning for a 5th year leaves no doubt about either whether or why I chose to leave my position at the school.
During that time, I stayed above the fray, and let the Bush School’s community comments (that the media was labeling as “insanity” from “anonymous rage monkeys”) go unanswered.
But recently, it’s come to my attention that those who have tried to follow the story online, after the fact, find themselves unclear about the “end” of the story.
And so, I’m writing now to give the story its epilogue.
I’ll try to make it brief.
It is not my wish to paint the whole Bush community as “bad”, “dishonest”, “corrupt” or “racist”. It is a community of individuals and there were a wide variety of reactions to my disclosure.
I think the best way to see both the best and the worst of how the school community reacted is to look at the reactions of 4 of the different people working at Bush in the wake of the video being released:
At the heart of this whole story is Frank Magusin. Frank’s title is “Head of School”, but new faculty members at the school are informed that “Head Fundraiser” would be a more descriptive title. Those who’ve argued that the real nature of the corruption at the Bush School is structural, point out that it could only be expected that a school’s main fundraiser will try to find ways to do what he can to keep the million-dollar donors happy with the school. The trouble arises when the school’s head fundraiser is allowed full veto-power over the unanimous wisdom of the school’s true educators. There wasn’t a single teacher at the school who believed that the school should reverse course on its promise to hold “Wallace”[1] accountable for the actions he made with his Nigga letter. (And there still isn’t. Indeed, after the story broke in the Seattle media, there was infighting among the faculty over who worked the hardest to get the Administration to not choose money over truth). There also wasn’t a teacher at the school who didn’t understand that this decision was Frank’s alone, and it was a decision he could not defend without telling lies. The very day this horrendous decision was announced there was intense anger with Magusin from all corners of the faculty. “Fuck Frank” was how that anger was expressed in one of the emails I received about the issue just hours after faculty was sat down to be told ‘How it was going to be.’ Behind closed doors, we heard about all of the wealth and the power/influence Wallace’s father had. The administrators argued that we just walk away from the situation, telling us about how much change Wallace’s father could bring about with a single phone call. But beyond this closed-door meeting, the administration proffered up a different story. “I have no idea who was behind that letter,” Frank would state repeatedly. This was the account Frank gave to students, faculty, parents, and even his own Board. Ultimately, my decision to go to the larger community with the story only came after a board member told me when the Board had let it be known that they were very upset about the handling of the situation, Frank had continued to let them believe that the reason why no one had been disciplined around the issue of the letter was that there simply wasn’t anyone to discipline; that the school had no idea who might answer for the circulation of the letter. This continued to be the understanding of members of the Board into the following school year, after Wallace was long gone.
In fact, Frank Magusin clung to his “Didn’t Know/Didn’t Discipline” story for more than a year after the letter was written and passed around on campus.
Although there were attempts made by the faculty and the parent community to get Frank to acknowledge that this cover of his was a lie, he stood by it from January of 2010 until May of 2011. What was made clear in those 16 months, is that there was simply no one WITHIN the Bush school community that would get Frank to state plainly that he did, in fact, know who had written the letter. In May 2011, the only force that could have exposed Frank’s story as a lie decided to take action. When the outside press began asking questions, Frank promptly switched from one lie to another. “Didn’t Know/Didn’t Discipline” changed to “Did Know/Did Discipline,” which made it clear that neither story was more than half true, and demonstrated that Frank Magusin would say absolutely anything if he believed it might make the story go away.
The brand new, “Did Know/Did Discipline” story was sent out to all parents in the community in a letter signed by Frank and the President of the Bush School Board, John Holt. Days later, when questioned by local CBS reporter, Debra Horne, Frank would repeat the story. His hope seemed to be that this new lie would be most effective in persuading the media to not run their stories. It didn’t work.
Worse than that, it meant that those who had worked to be obedient subordinates to Frank, and stand by his “Didn’t Know/Didn’t Discipline” story felt burned. The change of heart made by both Jack McHenry and Eddie Moore (see below) can be traced to this dramatic 180 taken by Frank. The anonymous members of the Bush Smear Campaign Squad were also left dumbfounded. For the 6 days between when the story broke, and when Frank reversed his cover story in his CBS interview, many members of the anonymous Bush School Smear Squad had worked to help Spread Frank’s first “Didn’t Know/Didn’t Discipline” lie. Only the day before, a Bush student who identified themselves as a “relative of one of these alleged RRBC members” had published online this first lie of Frank’s, exactly as Frank had been presenting it. But the following day, after this change of course, Frank’s defenders didn’t know how to best ‘minion’ for the man. (A few weeks later, at the 2011 graduation, one could find new graduates defending Frank saying “Truman’s story is all bull, the school didn’t discipline anyone because they didn’t know who to discipline” and other students who said “Truman’s story is all bull, the school didknow who to discipline, and so of course they did.”
There was one man who had no confusion about how he would chose to deal with Frank’s new lie. Shortly after the controversy around the nigger letter first began in early 2010, the school lost not just me, but also the school’s Director of Admissions (who had been an early and vocal advocate for having the school increase its own awareness about the RRBC and their actions), the Upper School’s Front Desk worker (one of the school’s few African-American employees), and the President of the School’s Board. While Frank was dealing with a Board that was asking questions of him that he was choosing to answer with lies, the school had to choose a new Board President. Frank Magusin let it be known that he had a clear favorite for the job. Frank was in a bad mess, and he needed just the right tool to get him out of it. He found what he was looking for in the form of John Holt, who in 2010 became the school’s new President of the Board.
John made it clear from the beginning of his term that he wanted to hear as little as possible about the nigga letter issue. His lack of curiosity regarding the issue was rather striking for someone whose job was to oversee the actions of the Head of School. When Frank Magusin and those around him were in a panic about how to “contain” the spreading story of the school’s corruption, John agreed to sign his name to a letter concocted by Magusin. This letter was the big “roll out” of the new lie from Frank, the public release of the “Did Know/Did Discipline” story meant to replace the worn out “Didn’t Know/Didn’t Discipline” one.
They say a dog is man’s best friend, but Frank surely had no better best friend on May 18th than John Holt, who would sign off on the statement that the Board had done a “thorough” investigation into the whole situation.
The letter seemed to be designed for people who were not paying any attention to the story, and who hungered for instruction to continue to not pay attention. Anyone with any awareness of the story before receiving the letter could only scratch their head and laugh at its contents. The night the letter went out my wife and I received calls from people who were still at the school who had determined that the only choice was to leave Bush now that it was this clear that the school was intent on not uprooting the rot that had taken hold of the school. One set of parents who called couldn’t stop laughing at the absurdity of the letter. “Thorough investigation”?? What sense could be made of John Holt’s claim when the people serving on the board that he was “leading” were stating that they’d been fed only the first lie even late into the 2010-2011 school year? Holt’s thorough review of the school’s actions seems to have not included speaking to:
-The faculty member to whom “Wallace” confessed multiple times about having written the letter, or -the full class of students who had watched “Wallace” confess to faculty about writing the letter, or -any of the students or faculty or parents who had expressed anger, at times directly to the Board about the fact that no one had been disciplined for this racially hostile joke.
It’s hard to find anyone who was contacted as a part of this alleged thorough investigation other than Frank Magusin. No one else, not anyone else from the Board or from the school’s administration, would add their name to Frank and John’s at the bottom of this cover-up letter. Not that the two didn’t try to find someone to stick to this story with them. There was an intention to have Jack McHenry sign off on this letter as well, but he would not do that. Not only that, but he has made clear that he wouldn’t ever sign his name to a statement claiming that the Nigga Letter issue at Bush was handled honestly and appropriately. While Jack had stood in support of Frank’s tale for more than a year, the whiplash he felt when Frank reversed his story caused Jack to have a change of heart on the issue. Frank’s 180 on what the story was behind the Nigga Letter inspired about a very different 180 from Jack. Until just shortly before, when the school was still sticking with its “Didn’t Know/Didn’t Discipline” story, Frank would come up to the Wissner building, on the upper school campus, to meet with the full upper school faculty and tell them that he was on their side - that he too didn’t think it was okay for Wallace to never have had to account or be held accountable for his actions. Frank, in detail, talked of how he walked up to Wallace on Wallace’s 2010 Graduation day, and told him that he was “very disappointed” that Wallace never chose to address (at the very least) the full senior class on the topic of his misconduct. (No one knows whether this exchange actually took place or whether it’s another piece of Frank’s fiction. Regardless, it’s the tale of an administrator who believes he gets to have things both ways, all the time). In those same meetings, Frank would loom over Jack McHenry, the Head of the Upper School, as Jack read out, word-for-word, a prepared, written statement that stuck with the story that the Letter issue had been handled in a honest and responsible manner. Though faculty got to hear this statement once, they were not allowed to take a second look at the statement, and faculty who jotted notes as Jack spoke were ordered to shred them immediately. (All of this happened long before any video had hit the web, or had even been filmed.) After Frank’s reversal, Jack would never again talk the same way about the school’s handling of the letter or the boy to whom the letter belonged. Jack made no secret of his turn-around. He would tell students and faculty about his change of heart, saying that while he’d said one thing about his reaction to the video prior to the drafting of Magusin and Holt’s cover-up letter he didn’t sign, he now wanted the community to know that what was in the video was indeed the truth. He said he was thankful that I’d done the courageous work of getting the truth out there and that he considered me to be a guardian angel of the school for having forced the school to deal with the truth of the administration's mishandling of the issue, a truth that it very much did not want to confront. By virtue of my efforts and the light they shed on this issue, Jack finally heard directly from specific African-American students about how hurt they’d been by the letter, and how they had to go, on their own, to Wallace to try to get an apology from Wallace. (Not surprisingly, having been given the signal by the Administration that he didn’t need to apologize for his actions, Wallace simply shrugged off the request coming from a hurt classmate: “I thought it was funny” he would reply). In a meeting of students and faculty who had attended the previous White Privilege Conference, Jack McHenry explained that “WE had been lied to by Frank” (emphasis mine). Subsequently, and this for me is huge, Jack offered a personal apology to the student who had tried, unsuccessfully, to get her own apology from Wallace while Frank attempted to cover up the entire ordeal. I don’t think the significance of this apology cannot be overstated. Frank had made it known via his actions that some members of the community were more deserving of dignity than others. Frank had made it very clear that between a nigger in the right, and a donor in the wrong, whom he would stand with. In the WPC meeting, Jack McHenry did all he could to try to right Frank’s wrong. And for that, I salute him. Jack wasn’t the only one to speak candidly in that meeting. The founder of the WPC, Dr. Eddie Moore Jr., had been lured to work at the Bush School by Frank Magusin, who had promissed Dr. Moore that issues of equality, diversity and white privilege needed to be, and would be examined openly at the school if he’d come to work there. In the meeting wherein Jack apologized for Frank’s behavior, Eddie used his own verb to talk of Frank’s actions. “We were played by Frank,” Eddie told the students present at the meeting. This meeting was also attended by both teaching and non-teaching staff, a number of whom reached out to me after the meeting took place. Eddie had seen his own misgivings about Frank Magusin grow in the previous months. In the Fall of 2010, there had been a brief, all-campus discussion about the nigga-letter issue after I had e-mailed to faculty a written version of the story (that would later be told in video form). Just afterwards, in early winter, Eddie, seeing the writing on the wall, began to send out job applications to other schools. Eddie and his wife, who had just had a baby, had planned to stay in Seattle and have Eddie stay at Bush for many years to come. Those plans went through an abrupt change. At the time of the meeting, it was clear that Eddie was thinking about the issue of the nigga letter frequently. Eddie talked of how angry it had made him to see Wallace -- this student who had had both his formal record and his informal reputation within the community white-washed by Frank’s lies -- return to campus midway through his first year of college, “and be treated like a celebrity”. He also spoke of how on the previous Sunday, so many of the fellow parishioners at his church had had asked him, “How could you work at such a place?” It turned out to be a question that Eddie could not answer. A few days later, in the heat of the controversy, Eddie announced that he would be leaving Bush in just a few weeks and moving his family to New York City. I heard from parents that Frank was at first desperate to talk Eddie into staying and then was desperate to try to “prove” that Eddie’s departure had “nothing at all” to deal with the nigga letter controversy. “Eddie had applied months before the video was released! It was back in the winter!” Frank would blurt to anyone who might mark him. “And how does he address the fact that Eddie’s winter applications came on the heels of the nigga letter becoming a faculty-staff wide controversy that had Frank scrambling in the fall?” “Uh…..Frank isn’t really making an effort to make his lies believable any more. He’s just kind of going through the motions of saying them,” a dad who was on his way out of the Bush school parent community in May of 2011 told me.
If there was any confusion about Eddie’s take on the school on his way out, it disappeared when Eddie sat down with local journalist and friend before leaving town. Eddie was upset with how little power he had to do anything, but also went on to say that he was disappointed in the school and in the fact that he hadn’t had much power there; he said that the whole system at the school was broken and that bringing in someone, anyone, to serve as diversity director wasn’t going to fix it.
Eddie wasn’t the only one who wanted nothing more to do with the school after their actions had been laid bare. Numerous African-American students from different grade levels and backgrounds withdrew from the school in the wake of the controversy. It was hard for me to watch as those who, like myself, had a genuine interest in doing the difficult work around issues of diversity and privilege left the school knowing that the very rich and very white families who saw nothing wrong with the way Frank had played the community were happy to stay. It wasn’t that anyone was confused about whether Frank had lied, it’s that he was THEIR liar. He had lied TO, and lied FOR, just the right people. Was there any good that came out of my actions if the bulk of the community squandered their opportunity to bring about meaningful change to the school? Yes. I’d always known that there was a risk that the school community as a whole would take the low road in response to this truth coming out. Regardless, I decided that if the ONLY good that came out of the disclosure was that the larger community would have the opportunity to know the truth about Magusin, John Holt, and the lengths those two were willing to go to keep the school’s wealthiest donors happy, then it would be worth doing. If the only student who received an apology from Jack and received the message that Wallace’s family’s donations should not be allowed to excuse his behavior was the student who received Jack’s apology in that WPC meeting, then yes, it was well worth it.
Truman Buffett
1. “Wallace” was a pseudonym I employed in the video in an effort to underscore that it is not the act of the boy that is the main issue for people to focus on, but rather, the actions the school took (and didn’t take) in response to his actions. In all school discussions about what the proper consequences should be for writing the letter, the child’s actual first and last names were, of course, used.[it's worth adding here that before this piece was posted here -- before today -- EVERYTHING WRITTEN ABOVE HAS ALREADY BEEN GIVEN TO EVERYONE NAMED in the piece. They've been asked to provide feedback on anything in the piece that they believe to false or inaccurate, they've also been asked for their comments or responses to the piece. The moment I hear from them, I will make it clear either in the body of this piece, or in the comments below. If you are reading THIS SENTENCE it means I have yet to hear of anything that anyone named in the piece disputes].
